France after 2012 / edited by Riccardo Brizzi and Gabriel Goodliffe.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In May 2012, French voters rejected the liberalizing policies of Nicolas Sarkozy and elected his opponent, the Socialist François Hollande, president. In June 2012, the incumbent president's center-right UMP party was swept out of government in the ensuing parliamentary elections, giving way to a new center-left majority in the National Assembly. This book analyzes the contexts and results of the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections in France. It assesses the legacies of the Sarkozy presidency that informed the 2012 electoral campaigns, scrutinizing his domestic social and economic policies on the one hand and European and foreign policies on the other. In turn, the elections' outcomes are also analyzed from the standpoint of various political parties and other institutional interests in France, and the results are situated within the broader run of French political history. Finally, the book examines the principal challenges facing the Hollande administration and new government of Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, and assesses how effectively these have been met during their first year in office.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

François Hollande and his Socialist Party received a majority in France's 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections. Framed by a very good introduction and a concluding reflection, this collection's 12 scholarly essays were initially presented at a conference in Italy a few months after the elections, prepared for an Italian edition in spring 2013, and then revised for this English-language volume. The first part's three chapters give a broad historical overview of the presidency, compare Hollande with François Mitterrand as France's previous socialist president, and analyze television's impact on the presidential campaigns. Part 2 appropriately devotes a chapter to each of the five major party groupings: incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy's moderate-right Union for a Popular Movement; the victorious Socialist Party; the Left, including the French Communist Party; the struggling Center; and, as the book's best chapter given its political economy orientation, the resilient far-right Front National. The third section contains four policy-oriented chapters on economics, the EU, foreign policy, and immigration. Despite somewhat uneven translations from French and Italian, this collection provides insightful analysis into the specifics of France's 2012 elections and recent developments in the politics of the Fifth Republic. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections. --Thomas D. Lancaster, Emory University